Don't kidnap my dog! Take my kids instead.

Monday December 24th, 2007 – Once again, Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian federation, has given me material for a blog. Russia announced that they will compete with the United-States GPS and the European Galileo satellite systems with their very own Glonass system of 24 satellites by 2009. Putin then exclaimed he will tag his pet Labrador ‘Connie’ so that he will be able to find her by satellite no matter where it is. The butcher of Grozny seems to have a soft spot for his dog who attends top-level many presidential meetings.

I was simply amazed that this impromptu piece of news was on the BBC News main page for 4 days. The ‘news’ only contains a few quotes and a small description of the satellite program. It seems as though the BBC News folks are as fascinated by Vlad as I am. I also find it amazing that he holds the dog with such esteem yet we have NEVER heard about his wife of 25 or about his two daughters.

For once, Putin is not so unique in his eccentricities; many heads of state have affectionately paraded their pets in the public eye. Some have treated these pets with love whilst butchering human lives. To this day, some people remember the pets more than the spouses or children of these leaders.

Using a backwards chronology, here are some fine examples of ‘royal’ pets.

William Jefferson Clinton AKA ‘Slick Willy’ was United-States President for 8 years (1992-2000). If it weren’t for his boyish grin and his misplaced cigars, we would probably remember his pet cat ‘socks’ a little more. Socks spent the presidential terms touring hospitals, retirement homes and schools as a ‘good will’ ambassador. An official investigation was also launched into the use of government resources to answer the cat’s fan mail.

Elizabeth Alexandra Mary of Windsor AKA ‘HRH Elizabeth II’ is the currently ‘of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith’ (1952-today). She owns 4 Pembroke Corgi dogs. They are truly ‘royal’ dogs in that they are as pampered as the Queen herself. As it were, they are constantly ‘hounded’ by the media (horrible, horrible pun).

Franklin Delano Roosevelt AKA ‘FDR’ was United-States President for a whopping 13 years (1932-1945). His legendary Scottish terrier, ‘Fala’, has been immortalized along with his master as a bronze statue in Washington DC. Fala was a de facto part of the presidential image. He accompanied the president at the Yalta and Quebec conferences during WW2 and a short film was made about his life in the White house.

Adolf Hitler AKA ‘Tiny mustache’ was Chancellor and President of the German Third Reich (1932,1933 - 1945). He had a pet German shepherd named Blondi throughout his reign. This cruel man also seemed to have a soft spot for the dog that he bathed and slept with. Blondi was allowed a last cyanide meal in the Berlin bunker before Adolf shot himself.

Annibale Francesco Clemente Melchiore Girolamo Nicola della Genga AKA ‘Pope Leo XII’ was the leader of the spiritual world for 6 years (1823-1829). His pet cat, ‘Micetto’, practically lived in the Pope’s robes and was present for every papal function. Leo is now dubbed ‘eccentric’ yet I have yet to find a Pope that isn’t. He profoundly confused the finances of the Vatican yet he lived a very frugal reign…presumably, so did the cat.

Alexander II of Macedon AKA ‘the great’ was ruler of a short-lived universal empire (330-323 BC). A legendary and probably false tale recounts the taming of a horse. At the age of ten, Alexander tamed the wild black stallion by realizing it was afraid of its own shadow and thus turned it towards the sun. Bucephalus, as the horse was called, followed the king to the ends of the known world for 20 years.

I think we should pay more attention to how these leaders chose and treat a pet and then rub their noses in it when they assign the words ‘mindless animals’ to the Jews or massacre the Chechen population.

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(Pictured: Socks the presidential cat - Connie the soviet pooch)

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Look mommy! I tied my shoe all by myself!

Thursday, December 13th 2007 – South Korean ‘scientists’ have successfully cloned cats that glow in the dark. Through the manip- ulation of a particular gene, the cats are born or ‘xeroxed’ into existence with a protein that becomes a dull red in the dark. This extra- ordinary accomplishment (up there with penicillin and electricity) is allegedly the first step in furthering the genetic sciences. The ‘scientists’ affirm that: ‘The ability to manipulate the fluorescent protein and use this to clone cats opens new horizons for artificially creating animals with human illnesses linked to genetic causes’. This is true in the same way that buying a pound of cement is the first step towards building the Empire State Building.

I apologize to the South Korean ‘scientists’ for mocking their discovery, they must understand that I am especially mocking the effort poured into this endeavour and the great amount of pride they take in its accomplishment. An undisclosed amount of financial investment and time were spent in the goal of creating glowing cats. They call it a pioneering marvel for science, I call them GLOWING CATS! Nevertheless, you will excuse me if I was not surprised because I had read about the ig Nobel prizes a few months ago.

The ig Nobel prizes are given to the scientific breakthroughs or studies, in various fields, that offer the least amount of scientific promise. They ARE actual science yet will make you almost speechless through their uselessness. I use the word ‘almost’ because you will still be left saying …why? why? ....w…why? For example, in 2007, for aviation – the scientist who won, discovered that a hamster can recover from jet lag more rapidly when given Viagra. For Physics, the winners conducted a theoretical study of how sheets become wrinkled. For literature, a woman performed an extensive study of the word ‘the’. Finally for linguistics, my favorite, three scientists discovered that rats sometimes can’t tell the difference between Japanese spoken backwards and Dutch spoken backwards. Once again, these ‘breakthroughs’ make us laugh yet we must not lose sight of the fact that massive amounts of money and time were used up by a, let’s be honest, utterly fruitless pursuit. Some less humorous examples can also be historically cited.

When we talk of useless scientific experiments and add the epithet ‘cruel’, the Nazi regime of Germany (1932-1945) comes to mind. Apart from Doctors C. Clausberg and J. Mengele, a slew of shady physicians experimented on human subjects using a simple methodology of ‘trial and error’. For example, 1000 subjects at Dachau camp were given nothing but sea water to drink to see the effects and to randomly try counteracting the effects with various substances. They developed the cheapest way to sterilize a woman, namely to inject their uterus with acid. Their other random attempts at sterilization included massive amounts of x-rays, surgery, silver nitrate, iodine… Also, many subjects were deliberately injected with different poisons or shot with poisoned-tip bullets. This was not to see how much time the poison would take to act since the subjects were killed shortly after the administration, if they survived the injection. The autopsies divulged…..absolutely nothing relevant.

I am not comparing glowing cats with Auschwitz THIS time. I am simply demonstrating 1 of the 2 reasons I have observed for which people would run useless experiments. The first is ‘just for kicks’. The Nazi officers (Sturmabteilung, Scutzstaffel) were sadistic and psychopathic (75-90% of them according to various studies) and thus the experiments were easily justified in their thirst for blood, even if they are hiding behind a scientific justification. The second reason, which probably applies more to the glowing cats, is pure curiosity combined with ignorance. Humans have a compulsion to know things that they don’t, to the point of researching trivial things. The ignorance factor is a lot less pronounced today since we have researched, at least partially, most things that have any importance on our daily lives. It wasn’t always so.

Further back in history, the first medical breakthroughs were also largely conducted with a ‘trial and error’ approach. Trepanation (drilling of the skull to remove a fragment) was widely used from Antiquity to the Modern period to relieve pressure of excess blood. They tried bleeding the patients everywhere and the head worked the best; probably because the hole relieved pressure on the brain that had swelled with various infections. Furthermore, Leonardo da Vinci (1442-1519) was among the firsts to pop open the human body and give a tentative function to all the weird sacs he found; the muscles were red because they were stained with blood. The blood, of course, comes from food… Finally, my favorite treaty of human remedies comes from the Greek, Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD) in his Natural History (77 AD). This gem gave us the obvious treatment for headaches in women, fumigation of the uterus. Also for hemorrhoids, he suggests a nice enema of herbs and mud. I am guessing most of Pliny’s experiments involved doing something random and if the person got better, what he did works.

Whether for reasons of cruelty or curiosity, the magnanimous level of knowledge that we have achieved in 2007 has marginalized the potential of original experimentation. We are thus treated to glowing cats and are told that it is a ‘breakthrough’.

(Pictured: Leonardo da Vinci's anatomy of a man - Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele - Glowing cats, ie: the same result as when you put a flashlight under their belly)

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Oil is a four-letter word

Friday December 7th, 2007 – An oil tanker has ruptured off the coast of South Korea, leaking 10,000 metric tones of crude oil into the yellow sea. It was struck by a passing barge during ideal weather conditions; the ensuing slick presently covers over 20 kilometers of water. An emergency ecological operation was launched earlier in the day yet any efforts to avert this complete disaster will be purely symbolic.

Maritime oil transportation, in my opinion, is no safer today than it was 50 years ago. In fact, the increasing enormity of ships, the rising traffic in main commercial straits and the rising price of the barrel all contribute to the construction of money-saving mega-tankers bumping up against each other as they slowly make their way to a Western refinery. Presently, the straits in the Persian Gulf, Red sea, Yellow and South China seas are the most congested commercial paths on the planet. Areas that can’t exactly afford the effects of an oil spill. If these oil tankers can be sunk by a simple barge on a sunny day, perhaps we should rethink this method of transportation. Don’t get me wrong, I am not offering a solution; no current method of transportation would be able to even come close to the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the tanker. On the other hand, we have to be willing to deal with these disasters of epic proportions until will develop a solution.

At this point, some of my regular readers will be screaming out ``hypocrite!`` at the top of their lungs for I am not an environmentalist and even have a profound conviction that ecological concerns have slowed down the development of our civilization by impeding on it with frivolous preoccupations (and guilt). I am simply stating the social and economic implications of these much-too-frequent oil spills. Firstly, the national resources that will be rerouted to clean the water, sanitize the coastline, save the marine life and go on a massive ecological media blitz will amount to an extraordinary sum of capital in a region riddled with poverty, famine and disease. Secondly, the massive amount of coastline and marine life affected by the spill will render destitute the hundreds, even thousands, of workers that depend on fishing for basic subsistence and/or small exporting businesses. Being a peninsula with a population density of close to 500 people per square kilometer, the seas around it provide the only agrarian outlet for the majority of the South Koreans.

All media (that is, all media that isn’t hell bent on showing us that the mall killer from Omaha was justified in killing people for media recognition), will assign the epithet of ‘ecological disaster’ to this ‘Hebei Spirit’ oil tanker spill yet, as I have shown above and affirmed through my beliefs, the ‘green’ factor is a detracting element that prevents us and international organizations from focusing on the real social end economic facets of the disaster. This has also been the case in the past.

On March 24, 1989, an Exxon oil tanker struck a reef and excreted 11 million metric tones of oil off of Valdez, Alaska. To a much more marginal degree, the inhabitants of Alaska’s southern coast were, and still are, heavily affected by the economic implications of a ruined coastline and wasted marine resources. I say to a lesser degree because the standard of living in Alaska permits a diversified economy that could cushion this loss of resources. Nevertheless, all media coverage was about the limping baby seals and blackened rocks. Brigitte Bardot can save all the baby seals she wants but I think, once again, famous people missed the point and prevented the focus to be directed on the real problems of the region.

All in all, environmentalism is at the very top of Maslow’s pyramid of human wants and needs. People will always have to eat, drink and procreate before they can worry about the health of shrimp and the colour of rocks.
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(Pictured: The Exxon tanker in Alaskan waters - the Hebei Spirit off of Taean, South Korea)

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